Well, I’m not sure if anybody has come up with this yet, but here is my idea for finding the other 2 lost games.
Instead of just a giant fundraiser, maybe the site could have its own paypal account just for Dragon Hopper and Zero Racers. From time to time, people can add maybe $5 or so whenever they can or feel like it. Every month, the site could give an update on what the total balance is. No pressure, just a little bank. 🙂
And because I was bored, I tried to do some research on google in Japanese. I can’t find anything for Dragon Hopper at all. Any info on Zero Racers just says that it wasn’t finished.
Here is the official japanese name for Zero Racers if anybody is interested. Faceball was owned by Mr. G, so maybe Japan will help us again. 😉
If someone in a possesion of a prototype see the paypal account, he won’t make any offer to any one. Instead, (if he is clever), he will wait for months and years that the balance is really high before telling he has a proto.
If I was in a possesion of a proto, and there is 200$ more each months, I won’t tell anyone that I have one, and I will wait for years. I think I will stop waiting only when people will stop giving money to the paypal account.
So, a paypal account with a public balance is really bad I think…
If I was in a possesion of a proto, and there is 200$ more each months, I won’t tell anyone that I have one, and I will wait for years. I think I will stop waiting only when people will stop giving money to the paypal account.
So, a paypal account with a public balance is really bad I think…
Well – as long as there is only ONE prototype, yes.
Generally I think you´re right…it would only play into the hands of venturers, as you can see on ebay for quite some time now. Top venturer is a guy wanting 1500 bucks for a console worth 70 euros.
One of the difficulties that must be faced in obtaining an unreleased prototype is having to deal with the personality who has a cart or ROM of the game. I have heard rumors that Dragon Hopper has been in private hands for years, and I personally strongly believe that the rumors are true, even though I have never seen any actual proof of this. If it is, in fact, true, then the personality or personalities who own the game obviously do not want to come forward publicly and obviously are not publicly seeking any money for the game, or surely he or she or they would have tried to go about such things already in that fashion. I use the word “publicly” as a qualifier, because there is definitely the strong possibility that such things happen privately. In fact, there could be people who own the Dragon Hopper ROM right now, who have visited these forums and smile to themselves as they read all of the comments from people who would love to play the game, but they are likely proud of the fact that they are one of the “chosen few” who ever get to play it, and they probably don’t want to ever give up the joy of that. Unfortunately, there is a strong “collector’s mentality” in existence, where one with the collector’s mentality wants to own something that almost nobody else owns, which can be connected to nothing other than pride the way I see it, and if that is ever taken away from him, then his joy and pride is taken away, and he is basically defeated, and he does not want to be defeated. It is as if he is sitting on his high throne of collector’s glory, far above all others who can never have access to that which gives him his pride and joy, and if others would get to access to his pride and joy, then he would be knocked down from his high place and be brought to the level of all others, and what would he have to boast to himself about then?… Nothing… It’s as if having the game that nobody else has is so important to him that life loses all meaning if others can play it. So, the one with the collector’s mentality doesn’t care about money or any other offers for the game to be given to everyone. No amount of money or offers could make him give up that which places him on his throne of glory.
If Dragon Hopper or Zero Racers is out there and in the hands of a person or persons with such mentalities, no public movement to acquire the game will ever work, in my opinion. It would most likely have to be done privately, almost like an infiltration initiative would have to be set up in some way.
But then again… one of those games could also just be sitting in some ex-Nintendo employee’s closet somewhere, and he doesn’t even know about the interest in it or the demand for it because he doesn’t follow the Virtual Boy at all. If that’s the case, and such a person is ever found, then he may just be like “Oh… sorry… I didn’t know this was so important. Here, have it.”
Instead of trying to aquire theese impossible games why don’t we just pay one of our own to code them for us. Use the account that Segagamer talked about but put a limit on how much the account will go to then have a tallented programmer like DanB or M.K. or Thunderstruck or all 3 Create the game for us. Thats how I see it
MineStorm wrote:
I’m 100% sure there is an ‘inner circle’ and that it has at least 2 members from this site.
Yeah I have had my suspicions about that ‘inner circle’ too, we just need someone in there to have a change of mindset and decide its only a game, like everything is, so lets all play it, but I think Ben Stevens is pretty much bang on with his theory, so its unlikely.
Yeah I’m sure both do exist somewhere, I’d like to think its the last part of Ben’s theory, sitting in the bottom draw in some chaps office who has no idea of what in there and one dull day he tips the lots out to sort it and decides to google this odd looking cart he has in hand…….. and we all smile when a newbie posts hello, look what i found…..
morintari wrote:
Instead of trying to aquire theese impossible games why don’t we just pay one of our own to code them for us. Use the account that Segagamer talked about but put a limit on how much the account will go to then have a tallented programmer like DanB or M.K. or Thunderstruck or all 3 Create the game for us. Thats how I see it
I would definitely be up for contributing to a project like that! Seriously… I would contribute a large amount to go towards the work on a game similar to Zero Racers.
The thing is, Faceball and Zero Racers can more easily be replicated because their game concepts are much more simple than with Dragon Hopper. Dragon Hopper, as far as I know, has all sorts of plot and different characters and items and who knows what all else, which have never been publicly made known in any form, so to begin to try to replicate it would be near impossible, unlike with Zero Racers where screenshots from magazine scans could be used to replicate very similar racers and also replicate tracks that have already been revealed, while just adding new tracks would be necessary, and also unlike with Faceball where, thankfully, we now have access to the actual enemies, special-ups, and 14 maze layouts from the original game, all of which can now be expanded upon. But Dragon Hopper… I can’t imagine that anything anyone would try to make from the little info about it that we know could come anywhere close to the true game.
Zero Racers would be way easier to make! We could use inspiration from other F-Zero games, and there probably are other racing games that are similar. Plus, the music could be from other F-zero games as well.
Considering Faceball was only found a year or so after Bound High!, maybe the others will be found as quickly.
morintari wrote:
Instead of trying to aquire theese impossible games why don’t we just pay one of our own to code them for us. Use the account that Segagamer talked about but put a limit on how much the account will go to then have a tallented programmer like DanB or M.K. or Thunderstruck or all 3 Create the game for us. Thats how I see it
I will never do a VirtualBoy because someone pays me for it. I use this as a source of distraction as it is a fun hobby. That’s the only reason I can invest so much time into it. Taking money for it would mean it is work instead of a hobby and thereby take the fun out of it. Also I think my games are far away from the quality M.K. and DanB have archived so far.
That said, feel free to sent me beer if you want to.
Kirbendo wrote:
I’ll give one thousand dollars to anyone who makes a Mario platformer on the VB like Mario Land VB would have been. 😀
Ok, give $1000 to Nintendo. Want to know their new game? Virtual Boy Wario Land. 😉
To be honest, I really don’t care for Mario VB. It would have had to compete with Wario Land, which is a lot like Mario, and is even better than a few Mario games.
How would Mario Land VB compete with that masterpiece?
A lot of the programmers do this on the side. If they take money to make a game..they lose control over it. It might work for some programmers..but..I’m not sure.
Finding ROM dumps would be great. A chance to experience something lost and forgotten. But asking someone to recode that experience for us just seem to me like a waste of efforts. Instead, I would rather entice these talented coders to concentrate on original content. The Virtual Boy has so much untapped potential and compared to other systems it has so very few completed homebrew projects. So wouldn’t asking for new games and applications outweigh the experience of a shot-in-the-dark remake of an unreleased game?
I often like to compare the Virtual Boy to the Vectrex when discussing homebrew development. Currently, the Vectrex has more completed homebrew games released for it than official games. There is no reason the Virtual Boy can’t be the same way. All it takes is a dedicated few to tackle the easy (tic-tac-toe, matching, puzzle) to the much more challenging (Virtual Boy Zelda, Virtual Boy Doom, etc).
Lester Knight wrote:
Finding ROM dumps would be great. A chance to experience something lost and forgotten. But asking someone to recode that experience for us just seem to me like a waste of efforts. Instead, I would rather entice these talented coders to concentrate on original content. The Virtual Boy has so much untapped potential and compared to other systems it has so very few completed homebrew projects. So wouldn’t asking for new games and applications outweigh the experience of a shot-in-the-dark remake of an unreleased game?
I often like to compare the Virtual Boy to the Vectrex when discussing homebrew development. Currently, the Vectrex has more completed homebrew games released for it than official games. There is no reason the Virtual Boy can’t be the same way. All it takes is a dedicated few to tackle the easy (tic-tac-toe, matching, puzzle) to the much more challenging (Virtual Boy Zelda, Virtual Boy Doom, etc).
Maybe we can start a kickstarter for raising a lot of money to help coders make a Virtual Boy game with original characters and gameplay and actualy sell it at the end. 🙂
Kirbendo wrote:
Maybe we can start a kickstarter for raising a lot of money to help coders make a Virtual Boy game with original characters and gameplay and actualy sell it at the end. 🙂
I’m in… provided someone’s got a design doc of a game ready to go and a schedule by which to finish it, heh. Then it’s more like a job, though, so the ‘brewers here might not be too interested. Plus the rewards tiers would pretty much be: “$1, get updates and a thanks!; $100, get the game!; $120, get the game and a box!!”, which is a huge scale for a Kickstarter…
I backed a Dreamcast game kickstarter that’s taking longer than anticipated to get released and the company wasn’t being very good with updates at first… but after much complaining, they’ve become more transparent and it’s really helped me feel a lot better about the process. It’s also my lesson for kickstarters: Make sure they’re communicative!
